Nautical Leagues to Centimeters (nlea to cm)

1 nautical league equals 555,600 centimeters exactly.

1 nautical league = 555,600 centimeters

How to convert nautical leagues to centimeters

To convert nautical leagues to centimeters, multiply the number of nautical leagues by 555,600. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply centimeters by 0.000001799856012 (rounded).

centimeters = nautical leagues × 555,600

Example: 10 nautical leagues = 5,556,000 centimeters.

About these units

Nautical League (nlea)

NauticalHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

Three nautical miles (5.556 km). Used at sea; the title of Jules Verne's novel counts distance in these.

Jules Verne's 1870 novel title promises twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, a number that would circle the planet several times over, and the unit behind it is worth unpacking. Leagues descend from a Celtic measure that Rome took over as the leuga, supposedly about what a person could walk in an hour. Seafaring nations later adapted the word to the water, where distance was reckoned from the sea rather than from the road.

At sea, English usage made a league three nautical miles. With the international nautical mile fixed at exactly 1,852 m by a hydrographic conference at Monaco in 1929, that gives 5,556 m, the figure used here, or 5.556 km. It equals thirty cables and covers three minutes of latitude. Earlier national nautical miles differed a little, and Portugal and Spain defined maritime leagues from fractions of a degree of meridian, so values near 5.5 to 6.2 km turn up in older texts. Verne's league was a French unit, a metric one of 4,000 m having been legal in France from 1812 to 1840, and the nautical league is now only historical.

1 nautical league = 5,556 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: League (unit); Wikipedia: Nautical mile

Centimeter (cm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.

Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.

CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.

1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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